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THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 6, 2017
we were pretty careful about what we
click on," Podesta said. In this instance,
he received a phishing e-mail, ostensi-
bly from "the Gmail team," that urged
him to "change your password imme-
diately." An I.T. person who was asked
to verify it mistakenly replied that it was
"a legitimate e-mail."
The American political landscape
also o ered a particularly soft target
for dezinformatsiya, false information
intended to discredit the o cial ver-
sion of events, or the very notion of re-
liable truth. Americans were more di-
vided along ideological lines than at
any point in two decades, according to
the Pew Research Center. American
trust in the mainstream media had fallen
to a historic low. The fractured media
environment seemed to spawn conspir-
acy theories about everything from
Barack Obama's place of birth (sup-
posedly Kenya) to the origins of cli-
mate change (a Chinese hoax).Trump,
in building his political identity, pro-
moted such theories.
"Free societies are often split be-
cause people have their own views, and
that's what former Soviet and current
Russian intelligence tries to take ad-
vantage of," Oleg Kalugin, a former
K.G.B. general, who has lived in the
United States since , said. "The
goal is to deepen the splits." Such a
strategy is especially valuable when a
country like Russia, which is consider-
ably weaker than it was at the height
of the Soviet era, is waging a geopolit-
ical struggle with a stronger entity.
In early January, two weeks before
the Inauguration, James Clapper, the
director of national intelligence, released
a declassified report concluding that
Putin had ordered an influence cam-
paign to harm Clinton's election pros-
pects, fortify Donald Trump's, and
"undermine public faith in the U.S. dem-
ocratic process."The declassified report
provides more assertion than evidence.
Intelligence o cers say that this was
necessary to protect their informa-
tion-gathering methods.
Critics of the report have repeatedly
noted that intelligence agencies, in the
months before the Iraq War, endorsed
faulty assessments concerning weapons
of mass destruction. But the intelligence
community was deeply divided over the
actual extent of Iraq's weapons devel-
opment; the question of Russia's respon-
sibility for cyberattacks in the elec-
tion has produced no such tumult.
Seventeen federal intelligence agencies
have agreed that Russia was responsi-
ble for the hacking.
In testimony before the Senate,
Clapper described an unprecedented
Russian e ort to interfere in the U.S.
electoral process. The operation in-
volved hacking Democrats' e-mails,
publicizing the stolen contents through
WikiLeaks, and manipulating social
media to spread "fake news" and pro-
Trump messages.
At first, Trump derided the scrutiny
of the hacking as a "witch hunt," and
said that the attacks could have been
from anyone---the Russians, the Chi-
nese, or "somebody sitting on their bed
that weighs four hundred pounds." In
the end, he grudgingly accepted the
finding, but insisted that Russian inter-
ference had had "absolutely no e ect on
the outcome of the election." Yevgenia
Albats, the author of "The State Within
a State," a book about the K.G.B., said
that Putin probably didn't believe he
could alter the results of the election,
but, because of his antipathy toward
Obama and Clinton, he did what he
could to boost Trump's cause and un-
dermine America's confidence in its po-
litical system. Putin was not interested
in keeping the operation covert, Albats
said. "He wanted to make it as public
as possible. He wanted his presence to
be known," and to "show that, no mat-
ter what, we can enter your house and
do what we want."
2. COLD WAR 2.0
R , the Obama Adminis-
tration learned of the hacking op-
eration only in early summer---nine
months after the F.B.I. first contacted
the D.N.C. about the intrusion---and
then was reluctant to act too strongly,
for fear of being seen as partisan. Lead-
ers of the Pentagon, the State Depart-
ment, and the intelligence agencies met
during the summer, but their focus was
on how to safeguard state election com-
missions and electoral systems against
a hack on Election Day.
That caution has embittered Clinton's
inner circle. "We understand the bind
they were in," one of Clinton's senior ad-
visers said. "But what if Barack Obama
had gone to the Oval O ce, or the East
Room of the White House, and said, 'I'm
speaking to you tonight to inform you
that the United States is under attack.
The Russian government at the highest
levels is trying to influence our most pre-
cious asset, our democracy, and I'm not
going to let it happen.' A large majority
of Americans would have sat up and taken
notice. My attitude is that we don't have
the right to lay blame for the results of
this election at anybody's feet, but, to me,
it is bewildering---it is ba ing---it is hard
to make sense of why this was not a five-
alarm fire in the White House."
The Obama circle, which criticizes
Clinton's team for failing to lock down
seemingly solid states like Wisconsin,
Michigan, and Pennsylvania, insists that
the White House acted appropriately.
"What could we have done?" Benjamin
Rhodes said. "We said they were doing
it, so everybody had the basis to know
that all the WikiLeaks material and the
fake news were tied to Russia. There
was no action we could have taken to
stop the e-mails or the fake news from
being propagated. . . . All we could do
was expose it."
Last September, at a G- summit,
in China, Obama confronted Putin
about the hacking, telling him to "cut
it out," and, above all, to keep away from
the balloting in November, or there
would be "serious consequences." Putin
neither denied nor confirmed the hack-
ing e orts, but replied that the United
States has long funded media outlets
and civil-society groups that meddle in
Russian a airs.
In October, as evidence of Russian
meddling mounted, senior national-
security o cials met to consider a plan
of response; proposals included releas-
ing damaging information about Rus-
sian o cials, including their bank ac-
counts, or a cyber operation directed at
Moscow. Secretary of State John Kerry
was concerned that such plans might
undercut diplomatic e orts to get Rus-
sia to coöperate with the West in Syria---
efforts that eventually failed. In the end,
security o cials unanimously agreed to
take a measured approach: the Admin-
istration issued a statement, on Octo-
ber th, declaring it was confident that
the Russians had hacked the D.N.C.
The Administration did not want to